Side A – Yasgrid
For just a moment, Yasgrid felt herself teetering on the edge of the decision Elshira was trying to push her towards.
Would it really be so bad to kill the Fate Dancers?
Yes.
Her anger disagreed with that assessment but she’d been angry before and knew better than to let her anger be the one to make her decisions.
There were plenty of Fate Dancers who didn’t deserve her wrath, and even many of the ones who’d earned it were as much victims of their society as its creators.
Also, there was the small matter that Kyra’s mother hadn’t actually said she was dead, and even though Ki’lianelle was a language Yasgrod understood mostly through Nia’s fluency in it, Yasgrid was still cognizant of the ambiguity in what “she is no more” might literally mean.
“Who saw her,” she asked drawing on the patience of stone she’d learned from so many of her elders as a Stoneling child.
“No one,” Kyra’s mother said. She was unmoving, watching Yasgrid with eyes that glittered with something that wasn’t tears.
“Who declared that she was dead then?” It wasn’t, perhaps, a great idea to ask that specific question. Knowing who had chosen to abandon Kyra was going to leave Yasgrid sufficiently ill-disposed towards them that managing a civil conversation would be problematic.
“The camp council broke her standing,” Kyra’s mother said. “She is no longer a Fate Dancer. She is no more and never was. Her memory will be held in no honor and her place filled with no grieving.”
Good for her, she’s better off without them, Yasgrid thought but chastised herself. Kyra would not see it in that light. Banishment would be a loss that would wound her to her core. Possibly forever.
“That’s wrong,” Yasgrid said. She didn’t let her anger into her voice. She didn’t let anything into her voice, but the cold of the northernmost mountains found its own way into her words.
“That is not for the Bearer to decide,” Kyra’s mother said, her voice forced into hard flatness as well.
“It’s still wrong,” Yasgrid said, trying to pierce the emotionless facade Kyra’s mother was wearing.
“She is no more and no one will save her. No one may even look for her.” The pain behind those words was buried deep, drowned beneath an ocean of duty and a mountain of tradition.
Yasgrid breathed in deeply.
This wasn’t what she’d expected. It hadn’t been why she’d arranged for the Fate Dancers to capture her. The extent of her plan had been to make the right sort of commotion that Kyra would hear about it, and then convey a message of the danger Elshira posed during the inevitable trial, when Elshira’s scrying would be blocked by the Fate Dancers. She’d doubted the Fate Dancers normally shielded their trials, but as Endings Bearer, Yasgrid had been reasonably certain that she could threaten to speak of things which the Fate Dancers wouldn’t wish to become general knowledge.
Instead, she faced a very different road stretching out before her.
One Elshira had almost certainly planned for her to walk down.
One that lead to doom and ruin.
One she was going to walk down nonetheless, collecting all of the doom and every scrap of ruin she could find along the way.
“No one will look for her?” Yasgrid said. “Are you sure of that?”
At the touch of her hand, the door of the cage melted away and Yasgrid took her first step on the road before her.
Side B – Nia
Nia’s heart leapt at the idea of playing with Osdora, and leapt higher still at the thought of trying something impossible.
As though she and Margrada weren’t already playing a song they never should have been able to manage.
The thought gave her a moment’s pause.
Was she really willing to tempt fate still further?
She looked to Margrada, trusting her to have a better sense of what they might be capable of.
Margrada suppressed a chuckle and gave Nia a quiet nod, a delighted madness sparkling in her eyes which was probably a reflection of the light in Nia’s own.
“If it means you won’t go into the Darkwood, or at least won’t go into without me, sure,” Nia said.
“Hold tight to your song then,” Osdora said. “I’m going to need a few beats to see if I can make this work.”
“Okay?” Nia said and poured her focus into her drumming.
The magic that moved through her needed finesse more than force, and that wasn’t her forte, not yet at least. It was Margrada’s though and moving with the music was so much easier when Nia thought of it as moving in unison with the woman she loved. The curves and dips into the beat, the strange double hits, and the echoing trills, each one spoke to her in Margrada’s voice and asked for an answer from her that was only too natural to provide.
Then something vast joined them.
If they were two voices raised in song, the beat which joined them was the grinding of tectonic plates and the roar of a volcano.
Margrada slammed her drum harder, pouring power into their playing, while losing none of the sharp definition of the beats. Nia’s own timing grew muddy and she felt the song slipping from her grasp.
They couldn’t lose it through.
Not in the face of whatever it was Osdora was trying to do.
Nia tightened her muscles, striving for the crystal bright clarity Margrada held too even in the face of the world playing against them and found her beats growing even less distinct and more poorly timed.
She wasn’t going to be able match up to Margrada’s playing.
She just didn’t have Margrada’s skill.
And that’s when Pelegar’s words came back to her.
She was never going to have Margrada’s skill.
But she did have her own.
As the next beat washed over her, Nia let go and lost herself in it.